Alastair Pennycook

Alastair Pennycook is an Australian applied linguist. He is Emeritus Professor of Language, Society and Education at the University of Technology Sydney, and a Research Professor at the Centre for Multilingualism in Society Across the Lifespan at the University of Oslo. He was elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2016.

Alastair Pennycook is an internationally renowned applied linguist known for his work in four principal areas: Critical analysis of the global spread of English, critical applied linguistics, critical philosophy of language, and studies of popular culture and urban multilingualism. Four of his books have been awarded the BAAL Book Prize. Several key themes unite this diverse body of work: an insistence on understanding the politics of language, the ways in which language use is always bound up with questions of social power; the need to explore what language and languages are rather than accepting the ways they are described in orthodox linguistics; and the importance of understanding things locally, of seeing how things operate in their particular environments.

Books

Pennycook, Alastair (2024). Language assemblages. Cambridge University Press.